Seconds
by Red River
Summary: I've known you five years, Kouji. And I've still never seen you with your hair down. One-shot, Kouji's perspective. Light Kouji x Takuya, or deep friendship.


A/N: Just a one-shot idea that came to me. I see a lot of fics about Kouji's hair coming down, so I decided to give my own rendition. I intended it as a Kouji x Takuya story, although I suppose it could just be a deep friendship story. Take your pick.

Warnings: None.

Pairing: Kouji/Takuya (light)

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There was something wrong with Takuya.

Kouji couldn't put his finger on exactly what about the loudmouthed brunet seemed so different this afternoon, which they were spending seated side by side on the boy's bed with a video game blaring in front of them—an activity that had become more familiar to him over the course of five years than he cared to consider. But there was definitely something off. He'd been noticing the signs ever since they woke up that morning.

For one thing, Takuya would not sit still. Not that the energetic teenager had ever been particularly good with that aspect of mature behavior, admittedly. But Kouji had learned with time that, given something fast-paced and loud enough to watch, his best friend had at least a fighting chance of staying in the same spot.

Somehow, it wasn't working today. In spite of the first-person battle game continually emitting yells and bad music from the screen before them, Takuya had taken to standing up and sitting pointlessly back down at irregular intervals, bothering the stack of too many pillows behind him and the boy at his side every time. Even now, busy as he was losing to a computer player, he was kicking the rumpled covers with one distracted foot—an action that was quickly changing from mildly annoying to trampling Kouji's last nerve.

"Stop that," the dark-haired twin snapped, sending his companion a steady glare.

Takuya shot the look right back, putting a little extra force into his assault on the comforter. "I'll kick it if I want to."

Kouji swallowed a sigh. There was that temper, too. Of course, Takuya always had a temper, no doubt the reason there'd been so many arguments in the span of their friendship. Usually when the boy's patience was at an all-time low, Kouji could guess what had cut his fuse so short—but this time, he kept coming up empty.

The weekend had been going well for them. That was the reason for the sleeping bag crumpled on the floor, and the cluster of midnight-snack dishes beside the closet, and the offer from Mrs. Kanbara to stay another night, since the snow was coming down fairly hard now.

Originally, he'd intended to accept. Now he wasn't sure it was such a good idea.

"Ugh! Kouji!"

The frustrated yell pulled Kouji out of his contemplation, his eyes flickering to the tremendous red "K.O." flashing across the screen before settling on his companion. Takuya rushed his hands back and forth through his already messy hair, agitated clumps standing out between his fingers. Kouji only shook his head, sitting back to keep clear of his friend's flailing elbows.

Then there was that. Takuya never lost at video games. Never, except today.

"It's not fair!" Takuya shoved the controller off of his lap and it clattered to the floor, surprising the game back to its mode select screen. Kouji raised an eyebrow.

"That you've been flattened by a computer twenty-three times in the last hour?" he suggested. Takuya made a face at him.

"Rub it in, why don't you? But that's not what I meant, anyway. It's you. You're driving me crazy!"

"Me?" Were they finally going to talk about this, then? Kouji leaned back on his hands, studying his friend's deepening scowl. "What did I do?"

Takuya folded his arms. "You're a jerk. Jerk, jerk, jerk."

Kouji pulled his shin out of range of Takuya's angry foot, his lips pressed together in a considering frown. It wasn't the first time he'd been called a jerk—by Takuya, either, for that matter. In fact, if he'd cared to remember, it probably wasn't the first time that week that Takuya had leveled just such a charge. But the brunet seemed unusually serious this time, so Kouji bit back the accompanying insult and met his companion's eyes evenly, ignoring the tongue that had been extended in his direction.

"I assume there's more to it than that."

"Five years!" Takuya nearly shouted, reaching out one hand to poke the other boy in the chest. "I've known you five years, Kouji. And I've still never seen you with your hair down!"

Kouji blinked. "My hair?"

"Yeah, your hair!" Takuya threw his hands up in the air, collapsing back into his pillows with a glare that could have thawed the frosted window behind him. "You always have it in that same stupid ponytail! And you didn't take it down last night until I'd turned off the light, and you brushed it out while you were in the bathroom this morning." Takuya lifted his chin to meet Kouji's gaze, his determined stare taking on a note of accusation. "You're hiding it from me."

Kouji rolled his eyes. "What I do with my hair is none of your business."

"That's what I'm talking about!" Takuya returned, chucking a pillow along with his words. "You're a jerk!"

His dark-eyed companion dodged the pillow easily, but it was harder to dodge the deadly glower burning in his direction—though in Kouji's opinion, the expression only made Takuya look like a petulant child. He wisely kept the remark behind his lips, brushing a strand of newly irritating hair out of his face.

"Why do you want to see it now, all of a sudden?"

Takuya slumped further into his pillows. "I just do," he snapped, kicking at the post of his bed and thankfully missing.

Kouji didn't bother to reply. With someone like Takuya, who had an unnaturally powerful longing for anything forbidden, it wasn't impossible that the only lure of seeing his hair down was that it wasn't allowed. Any other day, he'd have left it at that. But there was something else lurking behind his best friend's eyes today—something that couldn't be explained away as simple obstinacy. So Kouji kept his lips pressed into a thin line, years of experience telling him that silence was the best way to get answers out of Takuya, since the boy could never stay quiet for long.

Takuya dug down into his bedding, messy bangs sliding to hide his eyes—but the stillness was too much for him, and in a moment he was sitting up again, banging his heels against the floor in a faltering rhythm. Kouji flipped the game console's power switch with his foot, sending the briefly flaring screen back to darkness, and the loss of the looping music made the silence far denser than it had been, tightening Takuya's shoulders at the same time.

In the end, the boy could only stand it so long. He turned back from the icy window with a frown that was growing more juvenile by the minute, a fitting complement to the furrows on his forehead.

"Kouichi's seen you with your hair down."

Kouji raised an eyebrow. "Why do you say that?" he asked.

Takuya pulled himself into a cross-legged position, those eyes that were normally bright with excitement and laughter darkening to fit his expression. "He said so. Izumi was wondering if you'd look like a girl with your hair down, and Kouichi said you don't. So he's seen it."

Kouji sent him a sharp look. "You want me to take my hair down so you can see if I look like a girl?"

"No," Takuya said, bouncing his foot against the sheets. "Kouichi said you don't. I believe him."

"Then you have a bet going," Kouji guessed.

"No!" Takuya snapped, his temper flaring again. "I just wanna know, okay? I just—ah! I hate you sometimes!"

His words were followed by an onslaught of pillows, too numerous to dodge but hardly worth blocking. One of the fluffy projectiles bounced harmlessly off of the dark-eyed boy's shoulder, but the second knocked over a cup of pencils on the desk and the third headed straight for their waiting dishes—and since he was interested neither in cleaning Takuya's room for the rest of the night nor explaining to Mrs. Kanbara exactly what had happened to her ice cream bowls, Kouji decided to intervene. He ducked an oncoming missile and grabbed his best friend by the wrists, his voice dropping to its business tone.

"Takuya."

Takuya looked up at him. His cheeks were puffed out in a full pout now, an expression that reminded Kouji distinctly of an irate chipmunk, and in spite of himself the younger twin felt the urge to relent circling his rib cage—an emotion that all too often accompanied the face Takuya was pulling.

Kouji sighed and released his prisoner, one hand rising to massage his forehead.

"Look, Takuya. Kouichi—"

"He's your brother. I know." The brunet lifted a hand to scratch his ear, watching the younger twin through the fringe of his bangs with a curious, unhappy look Kouji wasn't sure he'd ever seen before. "But I'm your best friend, right? Shouldn't that mean something, too?"

Kouji shook his head a little. "Let me finish, you idiot. Kouichi has seen my hair down because he was with me the last time I went for a haircut. I don't wear it any differently when I'm with him."

That silenced Takuya for a moment, as Kouji had guessed it would. The restless teen blinked at him and his frown briefly disappeared, replaced with open surprise—but the expression was back as quickly as it had departed, and though not quite as sharp, the boy's face had lost none of its stubbornness. Takuya leaned back against his headboard, stiff arms crossed over his chest.

"Still."

They had reached the point in their argument when Takuya's already thin grasp of rhetoric inevitably failed him, leaving Kouji face to face with a countenance that simply asked why the boy wasn't being given what he wanted. It was an attitude he hated giving in to, especially because he was convinced that Takuya's already demanding nature was only being exacerbated by this kind of victory. But that didn't make it any easier to deal with the face his best friend was pulling now—a face that said, _I don't like this. Aren't you going to do something about that?_

Kouji had yet to figure out why he always answered that question _Yes_.

With a sigh to match the tremendous headache sitting incarnate across from him, the dark-eyed boy reached back over his shoulder, unwinding the band that kept his ponytail in place. The instant his arm moved, Takuya shot up from his slumped position, leaning forward to watch his friend with the rapt attention everyone only wished he'd devote to his studies. The gaping audience made Kouji want to stop what he was doing and tell Takuya to forget it—but the band was halfway out already, and hesitation now would only earn him more whining. So he turned to the window instead and pulled his hair all the way free, the strands falling like shivers onto his neck.

Takuya was staring at him, a detail that deepened the frown on Kouji's lips and drew his gaze back to the troublesome teen, eyes darkening in spite of the glowing snow outside.

"Happy now?" he asked, disrupting the boy's focus. Takuya made a face at him.

"No. It's all bunched up behind your neck. I can't see what it looks like at all."

Kouji rolled his eyes and reached back to fix the problem. But tan hands beat him to it, stretching over his shoulders and pulling the crumpled strands straight before he could so much as touch them. Blue eyes blinked at the pair of deep brown that was much closer now, bright with the glow of Takuya's smile as the boy finished his correction, fingers settling onto his companion's surprised shoulders.

"There. That's better."

Takuya tilted his head to the side, pushing his lips together as he examined his friend from a different angle, and Kouji did his best to sit still, fighting the urge to bind his hair up again. It wasn't comfortable against the back of his neck—he felt off his guard this way, without the familiar, serious knot at the head of his spine. But Kouji knew that Takuya had a short attention span, and that the only thing liable to drag this ordeal out longer than necessary was telling the iron-willed boy to knock it off before he was ready, so he held his peace.

At last Takuya's hands retreated, and he pressed them back into the sheets, laughing in a way that seemed to fill the whole room. "Yeah, Kouichi's right. You don't look like a girl."

Kouji sent him a heavy glare. "Thank you for affirming what we both already knew," the younger twin replied, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of his tone. He reached up to tuck his hair into its usual pattern, but again he was stopped, this time by five eager fingers on his arm. Takuya shook his head, tugging a strand of dark hair over Kouji's shoulder with his free hand.

"Wait. You can't put it away yet. I'm not done playing with it."

Kouji's frown matured into a scowl, and this time the downward curve of his lips dragged his voice with it, lending his words a layer of ice.

"I don't recall saying you could play with it in the first place."

The pout was back. Takuya twisted the captured thread of hair tighter around his finger, anchoring his hand on his friend's unwelcoming shoulder. "Aw, come on, Kouji. I wanna know what it feels like. And you've already got it down—what could it hurt?"

"You'll pull," Kouji said flatly, leaning back as far as the brunet's grip allowed. Takuya shook his head.

"I won't."

"You're pulling now."

Takuya's hand leapt from his shoulder, and the crumpled piece of hair settled back against Kouji's shirt, successfully rescued from the energetic boy. Blue and brown eyes exchanged glares for a moment, equally matched in their unyielding determination. Then Takuya clapped his hands together in a gesture of supplication, dipping his head a little so his hopeful gaze peered around the sides of his steepled fingers.

"Please, Kouji? I'll be really careful. I won't pull anymore, I swear."

Kouji glanced away, all too aware that this was another of Takuya's dangerous faces.

"No one has ever played with my hair, Takuya," he said after a moment, his words as sharp as the wind hurling snowflakes against their window. Somehow, they still made Takuya smile.

"I know. But I really, really want to. So, please? Just for a little while?"

Takuya squeezed his eyes shut to accompany the request, but after a moment one eye cracked open again, watching Kouji as though to gauge his plea's chance of success. It made Kouji want to relent again, or perhaps just to smile. Thankfully, his composure was strong enough to keep either reaction from showing on his face as he turned back to stare at the blizzard outside—unfortunately, his tongue was harder to control.

"Five minutes."

Takuya's face lit up like the sun, excitement painting a familiar grin onto his face. "Really? You mean it?"

Kouji rolled his eyes. "Hurry up before I change my mind, Kanbara." And Takuya didn't need telling again.

With a whoop and the energy he'd been lacking all morning, Takuya sprang out of his seat and dashed for the foot of the bed, collapsing into a sloppy cross-legged position at Kouji's back. Blue eyes watched over one shoulder until the boy reached for his hair, and then they turned back to the window, searching for patterns in the ice crystals scattered across the glass. Takuya gathered the dark hair together and ran his hands one by one down the length of the loose cascade, knuckles following the path of his companion's spine.

"Hm… what should I do with it, Kouji?" Kouji shook his head.

"It's your five minutes."

Takuya's fingers were moving through his hair now, cutting paths between the strands and leaving furrows in their wake. The boy laughed a little, and the sound alone told Kouji that his best friend's smile had grown mischievous at the corners.

"When I was little, I used to put Shinya's hair in pigtails. You want that?"

"Just try it," Kouji warned. But the threat only prompted another laugh, accompanied this time by a hand prodding his lower back.

"Kidding, kidding. Sheesh. Don't get all grouchy." A partition of hair flopped over his shoulder, and the younger twin glanced back, searching his companion's face for any sign of intention. Takuya raised his hands in surrender. "I'm just braiding it, okay? Gimme a break."

Kouji didn't reply, but he turned forward again, abandoning his hair to Takuya's no doubt limited styling capacity. Silence fell over the room again, soft as the snow but far warmer, and since silence like this—silence at all—was so rare between them, Kouji closed his eyes to savor it, imagining Takuya's movements from the butterfly touches on his back. The hair disappeared from over his shoulder, and Takuya shifted, one knee brushing his companion's thigh as he scooted closer.

"Your hair's really thin, you know that? I thought it'd be thick like Izumi's, but it's all wispy instead."

Kouji opened his eyes, rolling his shoulder forward. "You wanted it to be thick?"

In the foggy window, Takuya's reflection shook its head. "Nah. You'd look dumb with thick hair. When Izumi puts hers in a ponytail, it looks like she's got bananas glued to her head."

Kouji scoffed under his breath, and Takuya smiled at him through the surface of the frozen glass, one foot bouncing playfully where it dangled off the bed. The expression brought a whole new level of light into his eyes; Kouji liked the way they looked in the whitening window, softer if no less passionate than they'd been all morning.

When he was happy, everything about Takuya was bright. Sometimes Kouji wondered if it were one of the things he liked most about him.

A strand of hair had gotten out of place somewhere in the brunet's inexperienced weave, and it had begun to pull, sharp as a needle on the back of Kouji's head. But the air around them was comfortable enough now that the dark-eyed boy was reluctant to disrupt it, and in the end he swallowed his reproach, settling for an extension of the joke instead.

"The ponytail isn't as bad as the double buns she tries sometimes," he offered, brushing down the covers at his feet. Takuya nodded heavily, the braid growing sloppier as his attention wandered.

"The dango balls. Yeah. Don't tell her that, though. She'll bite your head off."

Kouji rolled his eyes. "Only you would say something like that to a girl, Takuya."

"Somebody had to!" the brunet insisted, tugging on his companion's hair for emphasis. "Junpei's polluting the water. He says she looks good no matter what. I was just sticking up for the truth."

"You just do it to bother her."

"Do not!"

There was an elbow in his back now, but it couldn't stop Kouji's smile, and in their reflection Takuya's grin had reached its limit, so warm that Kouji half expected it to melt the frost spreading like moss over the glass. The brunet snickered a little and Kouji felt the exhale on his neck, upsetting the few strands of hair that had escaped his braid.

"You remember last year, before the school festival, when she—"

"Made Kouichi do her hair," the younger twin finished, casting a glance over his shoulder to catch Takuya's teasing eyes. "I will never forget. And I will never forget you, either, telling her she looked like she'd dumped a bowl of ramen over her head."

Takuya was laughing outright now—laughing too hard to speak as he laid his forehead against Kouji's back, one hand tangled in the long blue braid. It was up to his companion to finish the story, a task he performed with a voice not quite flat enough to hide his smile.

"And Kouichi has never tried to do corn rows again."

Takuya was shaking against him, his laughter exploding in bursts of warm air that went right through his best friend's shirt, and without glancing at their reflection Kouji knew that his eyes were closed, leaving that endless smile the dominant feature of his face. Kouji let the ripples of the other boy's motion flow through him and wondered if there were any sound in the world he liked as much as Takuya's laughter.

The brunet quieted slowly, and even when the shaking had stopped he didn't lift his head, content to rest against the thin gray shirt. Only the hand clutching Kouji's braid moved at all, holding the dark hair up in a lazy curve.

"I finished."

Kouji didn't bother to look. He was busy tracing his companion's breath against his back, listening as each inhale became calmer and the space between them grew. Takuya shifted until he could press his face into the dark boy's spine, his voice muffled by skin and folds of cotton.

"Kouji?"

Kouji grunted.

"Do me a favor?"

Kouji turned his head a little—far enough to show he was listening, but not far enough to trouble the boy against his back. Takuya smiled and Kouji felt it through his shirt, warm with a disappearing exhale.

"Keep you hair in a ponytail. It looks weird any other way."

The younger twin cast his dark eyes toward the ceiling. "Something I could have told you without all this," he replied, and Takuya bumped him with an elbow again, his warmth disappearing from between the other's shoulders.

"Don't be a jerk. You said I could play with it."

For a moment their reflections exchanged shallow glares. But Takuya could only restrain his smile for so long, and it broke the challenge between them, clearing his eyes of their passing displeasure.

"Anyway… you look cool with a ponytail," he finished, dragging his fingers between the braid's faltering plaits. "At least, I think you do."

Kouji glanced over his shoulder, meeting the boy's eyes for real this time and gratifying the compliment with a small smile. His gaze flitted from Takuya's face to the mess of brown hair falling this way and that across his crown, and Kouji shook his head, a smirk pulling at the corner of his lips.

"Bedhead seems to suit you."

"Damn straight!" Takuya grinned at him, pride and teasing brilliant in his eyes. "None of that girly styling stuff for me." Kouji snorted.

"That, or you haven't learned how to use a comb yet."

"Hey!"

The shout pulled a pillow into Takuya's hands, and for the next minute Kouji was too busy blocking to notice that they were both laughing, their battle sending the uncontested sheets and blankets to the chaos of the floor. When the feather weapon finally joined them, both boys worked to catch their breath, fighting their smiles as Takuya stuck out his tongue.

"Jerk."

"Idiot."

Kouji turned to face the window again, his shadowy smile changing into an idle frown at the disheveled hair their impromptu pillow fight had given his reflection. Before he could lift pale hands to solve the problem, their tan counterparts were back on his shoulders, moving up to brush the strands flat.

"Here. I'll fix it." Takuya smiled behind his shoulder, glancing at the window to catch his best friend's expression. "I'll take the braid out, too. Since you can't see it or anything."

Kouji didn't need to see his hair to put it straight. Takuya had to know that. But that wasn't really the question behind the offer, so the dark-eyed boy let it go, his hands relaxing back onto the mattress.

Takuya was not as careful taking the braid out as he had been while putting it in, and the strands that got caught around his fingers prickled like pins on the back of Kouji's skull—but he let that go, too, and focused on other feelings. Like the brush of each untwisting third of hair on his shoulder, or Takuya's preoccupied breath along the base of his neck. Like the cold air pressing toward him from the window or the warmth radiating from the boy behind him, or the pressure between his lungs that was probably the effect of one of them.

The dark hair came free of its temporary weave, sliding down Kouji's back like a thin layer of water, but Takuya didn't stop moving. One hand after the other, his fingers burrowed through the navy strands, cutting parallel pathways down his companion's back. To Kouji, it felt like the touch of a ghost, soft through the layers of hair and cloth and silence separating them.

"Kouji?"

His name again. How many times each day did Takuya call him like that, the simplest way of asking for his attention? How many times in their years of friendship had Takuya laid his head against the flat of his shoulder as he was doing now, those restless hands contented and still on his best friend's back?

"Nobody's ever played with your hair before?"

Kouji smiled, reading the unasked question as easily as if it had been brushed into the fog on their frosted window.

"You're a special case, Takuya."

Takuya was smiling, too. Kouji wondered, not for the first time, if it would be impossible to keep that smile from ever leaving his face.

The brunet pushed farther into his back, aligning his brow with the top of the younger twin's spine. "Can I stay like this?" Takuya asked, his hands wrapping into the folds of gray fabric. "Just for a minute?"

Kouji closed his eyes.

"Just for a minute."

Silence descended on the cluttered room, as thick and soft as the snow piling ever higher on the windowsill, piling up against their frozen reflections. Kouji exhaled and counted to sixty, and then he counted again, and again. He lost track of the numbers when Takuya's arms slid around his waist, not from the contact but from the feeling that came with it—the boy's heartbeat, warm and steady against his back.

So Kouji counted the beats instead, separating them into patterns of sixty, listening for the moments when they intersected with his own. He counted them until Takuya shifted, sighing into his skin.

"I guess my minute's almost up, huh?" Takuya asked.

Kouji opened his eyes, one hand moving to cover his companion's.

"You have a few seconds left."


End file.
